Updated August 7, 2026. Quick answer: forming an LLC yourself is filling in a form on your Secretary of State’s website and paying the state’s fee. That is the whole thing. A formation service does not do anything you cannot do — it does it for you, and sells you a subscription alongside. An attorney is a different purchase entirely, and there are cases where it is the right one.
What filing yourself actually involves
Every state runs its own filing portal. You supply the company name, the registered agent and address, sometimes the members or a management structure, and you pay the state’s fee. Most filings are approved in days, and many states offer expedited processing for a small surcharge.
The parts people expect to be hard mostly are not: the name check is a search on the same site; the registered agent can be you if you have a street address in the state and are there during business hours (and the two real reasons to pay someone else); and an EIN comes free from the IRS in a few minutes online.
If you pay for one thing, be clear it is convenience. That is a legitimate thing to buy. It is not a legal outcome you could not otherwise get.
What a formation service actually adds
Honestly assessed, three things: they do the typing, they usually bundle a registered agent (a recurring fee, which is where the economics of the industry sit), and they keep a compliance calendar and remind you about annual reports.
The third is the one with genuine value, because forgetting an annual report is how an entity quietly falls out of good standing — and how an abandoned one keeps accruing: the walk-away trap.
What to watch: the low or free first year that renews higher, bundles that include an operating-agreement template you may not need in your state, and “compliance” packages priced against a fear rather than a filing. The state fee itself is never discounted — it is the state’s.
When an attorney is the right purchase
Not for a single-member consulting LLC. Genuinely, for these:
- More than one owner. The operating agreement is the document that decides what happens when partners disagree, one wants out, or one dies. A template cannot allocate control between real people who have not yet fallen out.
- Property with a mortgage moving into the entity — the due-on-sale question the federal statute does not answer.
- Outside money, or an eventual sale.
- A regulated trade, where the entity interacts with licensure.
The pattern: pay a lawyer for judgment, not for typing. If the question is which box to tick, that is not what they are for.
The honest order
- Decide whether you need an entity at all — often you do not.
- Form in your own state — not Delaware.
- File it yourself unless you are buying convenience knowingly.
- Get an attorney if there is a second owner, a mortgage, or investors.
- Diary the annual report the day you form, whoever files it.
We do not form LLCs, sell formation services, or take a commission from anyone who does. If that ever changes it will be disclosed on the page, and this page is where it would show up first.
Sources and limits
Honest gap. Filing procedure, processing times and what a state requires in its articles vary by state, and none is set out for a specific state here beyond the fees in our cost table. This page does not review or compare named services — we do not use them, we are not paid by them, and a ranking we could not test would be worth nothing.
See methodology and corrections. General information, not legal or tax advice. No advertising appears on this page and we earn nothing from it.
The same upsell reappears one step later, and there the IRS has settled it for you: a federal EIN is free and issued immediately — “Beware of websites that charge for an EIN,” in the IRS’s own words.